President Kennedy

 



Our local newspaper, the Wenatchee World, asked readers to submit their recollections of President Kennedy's assassination on the 50th anniversary of that heinous event. My submission follows:                          

          Television service came to my coastal Oregon hometown just in time for the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. I was 13 years old, and I was charmed by John Kennedy’s Boston accent, finger-stabbing speech mannerism, and loose haircut. I urged my parents to vote for him, not that I needed to worry.  They were FDR, Truman, and Adelai Stevenson Democrats. Mom tacked Kennedy’s picture on our dining room wall.

            I idolized John Kennedy, who urged us to get physically fit “With vigah!” and to join his brand-new Peace Corps. I adored Jacqueline Kennedy’s French couture and her work to restore the White House to elegance. I laughed at a 33 RPM party record mocking her whispery voice leading a tour of White House paintings, “There’s that one, and there’s that one, and there’s that one….” France and Germany loved the Kennedys, and I was proud of them.

            On November 22, 1963, at mid-morning, I was sitting in sophomore humanities class. Teacher Steven Ward rushed into the classroom and said “I think you people should know that the President has been shot.”

            “Where?” we asked.

            “In Dallas.”

            “No, what part of his body?”

“His head,” so we knew. We were a community that hunted deer and bought beef from farmers who slaughtered cattle with shots to the head. We knew that a human being who was shot in the head would die  like an animal.

            That afternoon the students were assembled to hear Mr.Rankin speak.  David Rankin was our American History teacher, and his father was a physician, so perhaps he was better versed than most to talk about issues of life and death. “It is not a tragedy that a man dies,” he said, “Because we all die. The tragedy lies in how he died.”

            We grieved together through a funeral parade on TV, as a spirited black horse passed by with a man’s boots turned backwards in the stirrups, and where a soldier played “Taps” with a sobbing grace note added to the tune. We felt a personal loss.